Lifesaver
by Arait
Summary: Inspired by the new Hybrid Mind Market picture. Yata was known to have a wide variety of part-time jobs. Lifeguard was no exception. Post RoK, the former friends have started the long path to reconciliation, and Fushimi learns a few things he had never known about Misaki.
1. Lifesaver

_**When I saw the new group art and shared it with fellow author of Waiting for Totsuka and A Growing World, Kateracks, we couldn't help but make fun of the improper word choice on Yata's shirt. Seriously, Lifesaver instead of Lifeguard? Anyhow, this is just a silly little idea that came from that shirt.**_

* * *

Once upon a time, Yata applied to be a lifeguard. It was a career suitable for his personality, and with the numerous part-time employments he had taken up over the years, it really was no surprise that he eventually tried it out also. He was an avid swimmer with a surfer's body that looked great in swim trunks. Having grown up with younger siblings, he was apt at yelling commands to rowdy children. He was attentive to people's needs and had super quick reflexes. He could even spend hours under the hot sun without suffering heart exhaustion.

It didn't work out at all.

There was one reason, and only one reason why the venture failed: bikinis. At the first sign of summer, girls of all sizes and ages appeared at the pool to show off their bare skin. With curves like that, dripping with chlorine water when they climbed out of the pool, Yata couldn't even look, much less perform his job.

The company did give him a second chance at the kiddie pool. He would walk from the office to his post, eyes on the ground and blushing to his ears. He took care of the kids very well. But if one of them had an attractive mother, or a teenage babysitter, or even if a girl so much as walked by with legs, cleavage, or a belly button showing, he panicked. He'd throw his floatation device, flail, even knock over his own chair or umbrella.

It made the women uncomfortable, so they had to let him go. They did occasionally still call him in to judge children's swim meets, where the adults were all fully clothed. He would stand at the corner of the pool, next to the finish line and proclaim the winner, as well as make sure no one jumped the gun. It didn't pay the bills, but he kept accepting because the kids liked him. A little extra cash on the side never hurt either.

There was a time when a little girl hit her head on the far end of the pool and didn't come back to the surface. Yata didn't think twice about throwing himself into the water to rescue her, so that a minute hadn't even passed before she was back on solid ground. Her whole team, the coach, and all of the parents shared the expense of buying him a red sweatshirt with the word LIFESAVER printed across the front in bold, white letters.

He was embarrassed to wear it most of the time. After all, what he had done was only normal. Anyone would have done the same; he was just fastest, so it wasn't really something to make a big deal about. He was rubbing his nose, like he did when he was feeling bashful, in the picture the team took with him, particularly because the little six year old decided to kiss his cheek. Red shirt, red face, reddish hair. All of the guys back at the bar made fun of the picture, so he kept his copy hidden in a box in his closet with all the other important things he never looked at.

This was just one of the stories Fushimi had missed from the years they had spent estranged. The first time he saw the shirt after their friendship got on the mend, he made fun of it as well. "Isn't it supposed to say _lifeguard_? That English is horrible. A lifesaver is the object you throw into the water to save someone, but I guess with that shirt on you'd be easy to mistake for one."

They weren't quite on good enough terms for Yata to explain properly when Fushimi riled him up like that, so he replied in like, "No one's gonna pick me up and throw me into the water, Smart Ass!"

"You're about the right size," Fushimi continued the taunting.

The conversation turned quickly to insults when Yata retorted, "At least I _can_ swim and don't just deflate like a blow up doll as soon as I touch the water!"

The next time the subject came up again, they got a little farther. Yata managed to affirm that he had, in fact, been a lifeguard before Fushimi cut in, "And your virgin eyes didn't bleed?"

As they were hanging out at the bar that day, everyone agreed that Fushimi was right on that account, and the tale came to a swift end again. With the passage of time, however, Fushimi learned to hold his tongue and Yata to control his temper until they could have decent, civilized conversations. He finally heard the whole story when they ran into the girl - now almost nine - and her mom at a McDonald's (Fushimi wanted French fries, and when that picky boy actually admitted to wanting food, no one stood in his way for fear he might change his mind and not eat at all).

It was quite a while after that when Fushimi found the flash cards. They were at the skatepark at the beginning of autumn, where one needed a jacket to be sitting around, but not when expending energy to learn a new trick. Fushimi had wanted to stay inside. It was cold and windy; allergens were all over the city. The last thing he wanted was to return to a full week of work with a runny nose.

Instead of just saying so like a normal person, he invented a way to mock his friend, "Aren't you a little old for new tricks?" He didn't even believe that to be true, and Yata knew him well enough to see right through it.

"You're the old one sitting at home all day long. Come on, I want your technical pointers."

And so Fushimi was dragged along. The skater carelessly tossed his jacket onto the bench and headed straight into the bowl. Half of the flash cards fell out of a pocket, and Fushimi begrudgingly collected them before the wind could blow them away, muttering complaints to himself. Curiosity got the best of him, wondering, so many years after dropping out of school right after Junior High, what could the air head possibly be studying?

The answer was shocking. The cards were full of acronyms like AFIB, mnemonics forming easy words like FAST, drawings of arrhythmias, and anatomical terms. It was all medically related, something Fushimi honestly had never pictured Misaki taking an interest in. After all, he had a lot of strong points, but when it came to books, he was dumb as a brick. Fushimi stared in disbelief at the flash cards, hardly even blinking as his mind raced for alternative possibilities.

Yata came running back. "See, even though I do it just like the videos show, I can't seem to get the landing right. What do you think?"

The younger of the two hadn't seen his friend's failed attempt that he was supposed to be watching attentively. Hardly even listening, he responded, "Uh...yeah... What are these?"

At first Yata didn't notice what Fushimi had discovered, but the items in question were held conspicuously in his lap. The skater scratched nervously at the back of his head through the beanie. "Aw nothing really. It's just a study tool." He tried to turn the conversation back to skateboarding, but Fushimi wouldn't have it.

"Why?" He asked abruptly.

"What do you mean why?" Yata replied as he slumped onto the bench beside the longtime friend. In reality, he knew exactly what that person meant with his question. They had agreed not to bother with school long ago. The smarter of the two, Fushimi would have had no problem getting into any school he wanted, but he found it boring and mundane. He chose to leave that all behind for Yata's sake, who couldn't seem to pound any knowledge into his dense skull. For his part, Yata dropped school and began his life in part-time jobs to rescue Fushimi from a bad environment. At the time, it had seemed like the right decision.

"All of a sudden, and you choose medicine?"

"It's not such a big deal. I'm not trying to be a doctor or anything!" He snapped a little defensively. "It's just for emergency response. I figured it was about time. You've got a steady job over there with the Blues, and even Anna is going to school now. I've gotta find something that'll last more than a couple months."

Anna really had been the motivating force behind it. Her class was starting to talk about how to choose the right career and which high schools were best for which domains. She had to write a report on her top choices, and she couldn't exactly say her current and eternal role was as Donna of Homra. It was her asking around that finally made Yata feel like he really needed a permanent direction for his adult life.

"Can you even understand this stuff?" Fushimi inquired.

"Sure!" He agreed enthusiastically but then added, "well some of it. I had to learn CPR as a lifeguard anyhow, and I've got plenty experience patching people up, so it's like I already had a head start. It's the names I have problems with." He didn't mention that the selection had a lot to do with losing two good friends and nearly a third.

Fushimi was still back at CPR. With an impish grin, he asked, "Do you really think you could give some lady mouth-to-mouth without dying?"

Yata's back straightened with a start, and he stuttered unintelligibly for a while. Finally he was able to form words, blurting out, "H-how often am I even gonna have to do that?!"

Fushimi snickered but didn't torture his friend eternally. "Trick question," he teased, reading the answer directly from a flash card, "Since 2008 health organizations agree that hands-only compressions are just as effective in adults except in cases of near-drowning, drug overdose, or carbon monoxide poisoning. Medical professionals should always provide rescue breaths with a barrier or a bag-valve-mask. This is the only way to ensure proper perfusion of target tissues."

Groaning in frustration, he snatched the cards from Fushimi's hands. "Just forget about it! I'm failing the class anyhow..."

"Nah, you should go for it."

"Huh?" Yata was surprised by the unexpected response.

"You'd make a good medic," Fushimi admitted.

* * *

 _ **Well that's the basic idea. If y'all like it, I'll write more, since I have a few more ideas for it, just not the words to express them yet.**_


	2. Tangerine Hotpot

_**Here's the next bit of Yata's disastrous attempt at learning medicine! Please enjoy the comedy.**_

* * *

Fushimi went with Yata to class one night. The major motivating factor was the bruises. That is, everyone at work fussed over him when he came in with contusions between all his knuckles. He hadn't thought anything of it or even bothered to cover the marks. They represented his support of Misaki's effort. It hadn't even occurred to him that being covered in black and blue would concern others. He didn't bother to explain, in spite of their insistent nagging.

It had all started while eating hot pot on a cold night. Fushimi found a needle in a slice of tangerine. Having fruit in a hot pot was a strange enough quirk of Yata family recipes that had passed down to Misaki, but to find also life threatening foreign objects in the stew was too much to ignore.

The chef's eyes widened in panic when he saw what had appeared in his friend's bowl. To Fushimi's questioning gaze, he exclaimed, "Ah, an IV!" while reaching out to take the offending slice of fruit.

"What?" Fushimi responded in confusion.

"An intra-something infusion to increase the volume of the blood during trauma or improve hydration with salty water."

"I know what an IV is," he interrupted Yata's semi-decent definition of intravenous therapy. "What is it doing in dinner?"

"Oh that," he scratched the back of his head in embarrassment. "They told us to practice on oranges to work on getting under the skin and not into the flesh."

"Looks like you got that one wrong." Fushimi pointed at the tangerine with a chopstick.

Yata made a face of frustration like he'd been wracking his brain for a better solution. "It's so hard! In real life you know you hit the vein 'cause you get a flash of blood, but oranges don't do a damn thing!"

That was how Fushimi offered to become target practice. Yata got out his kit, tied the tourniquet around his mock-patient's bicep, and tried to find the big vein that runs through the pit of the elbow. It should have been easy with pale skin like his, but the little blue lines wouldn't appear, even if he slapped the arm lightly. Fushimi waited apathetically as the medic-in-training missed his first two attempts.

"Gah!" Yata complained. "It's all that coffee you drink!" He moved to try the hand instead, and Fushimi didn't even flinch when the vein ruptured from the prick being too deep.

"I'd die before you got this right," he taunted.

Anger over the failure caused a particularly strong stab that sent pain all the way down the patient's fingers. Fushimi pulled away with a hiss.

"Shit! I'm so sorry!" Yata excused, extracting the needle from somewhere it never should have been. "Are you okay?"

Knowing he shouldn't have been provoking a volatile friend with a weapon, Fushimi tried his best to direct his negative reaction elsewhere. "What kind of worthless teacher is instructing you?"

"I told you I'm failing!" He shouted back.

"I could teach you better myself!"

That resulted in an all night study session. They got their instructions from internet tutorials. Yata forced Fushimi to drink a whole liter of water to "combat the vascular constriction caused by dehydration," which he somehow rattled off like the words really meant something to him.

The first new tip they found was to apply pressure by "placing a thumb a few inches distal to the site and pulling traction." Yata mixed up distal at first, but once he stopped trying to remember the word and just learned the idea, it made a significant improvement.

"That's too steep an angle," Fushimi warned before Yata could blow another one.

"They said 30 degrees."

"That's 45."

"Well how the hell am I supposed to know?"

To make the concept into something he could comprehend, Fushimi compared it to skateboarding. "It's about as far as when you tic tac."

"Mm," Yata understood. "Just off straight."

With those pointers in mind, he came very close to succeeding. He felt the light pop of the needle poking into the vein; he saw the flash of blood that signified proper penetration. Then, growing excited, he pulled back too quickly, and the catheter didn't stick.

Fushimi tried to inform him in time, but the enthusiasm overpowered his reading voice so that he had to speak in crescendo. "Once you've achieved proper needle placement and you're ready to advance the catheter, remember that the hand holding the needle does not move. The catheter needs to advance forward off the needle. The needle does not move backward out of the catheter."

"I know. I know," Yata replied.

"Then do it right," his victim protested, starting to feel like a pincushion.

The next time, Yata did just that. Fushimi didn't even know anything had happened until Yata exclaimed, "I got it!" Then, he looked down at his left hand and saw the rubber tube dangling properly between his pinky and ring finger. There was that glowing expression of elated enthusiasm that drew Fushimi to Misaki in the first place. That face made it all worth it. He enjoyed it briefly until he suddenly felt rather woozy, and Misaki rushed off to make him some tea.

At work the next day, rumors spread like wild fire about the walking pincushion. Because of his unhealthy lifestyle, he had diabetes - an idiotic suggestion since diabetic shots and testing had nothing to do with the top of the hand. He had been punching brick walls, or had pulled his daggers from his sleeves in reverse. Maybe it was one of those undiagnosable chronic diseases eating him away from the inside.

Awashima did her best to shush their gossip while they worked, but that didn't stop the Special Duty Corps from bothering him about it in waves over lunch. Hidaka showed the highest level of sincere concern, asking repeatedly if his superior officer was okay and, "If you need help with anything you'd tell us, right?"

"You had better not be in over your head all alone _again!_ " Doumyouji reprimanded worriedly.

Fushimi resolved then and there that he must vet this so-called "class" of Yata's to find out why they couldn't teach him properly. He maneuvered their plans discretely enough to make it appear he had no choice but to tag along to a class between hanging out. Yata wasn't fooled in the least, but he played along all the same.

Class began with a review quiz, through which Fushimi pretended to be preoccupied with his PDA. Really, he was stealing glances at the test, secretly over his friend's shoulder. Yata got six right out of fifteen, a wince-worthy score. The ones he did get right were the ones that really mattered: the order of treatment, the when's where's and how's. He didn't do so well with the dosing math or the scientific names.

The night's lesson was on EKG readouts. They studied a variety of graphs, normal and abnormal, which clearly depicted the different heart conditions. Whenever the teacher would ask a question, Yata would mutter half an answer to himself. He knew which heartbeat was abnormal on the spot. He knew what the pattern showed was wrong and how to treat each one. He could not manage to remember what they were called, which meant he couldn't answer a single question. The teacher made no concessions for nearly correct responses.

At least the practical application part of class brought some relief. There were several test dummies, and the students divided up equally between them (Yata quite skillfully got into the non female mannequin line). Compared to his poor performance throughout the rest of the lesson, he was the best of his classmates with the defibrillator. He made no mistakes hooking up the leads, even without referring to the diagram, correctly interpreted the readings, and determined whether a shock would help the condition at all.

Unfortunately, he was expected to explain his actions to the teacher to justify his choices. From him that sounded a bit like, "First, I couldn't feel his heartbeat, so I hooked up this thing with the wires, and it said his heart was shaking, so I shocked him."

It was the right answer, and yet so very wrong.


End file.
